from the blowing-it dept

Despite having publicly pushed BEA to sell itself, Carl Icahn's initial response to Oracle's takeover attempt was to say that the offer was too low at $17 per share. BEA itself responded by counteroffering at $21 per share. However, Oracle stood fast and said that since there didn't appear to be any competition, it saw no reason to raise the bid. It also said that the $17 offer would expire Sunday night. Of course, seeing as it's now Monday, the offer has, indeed, expired. Yet, Carl Icahn isn't happy. He's now demanding that BEA put the $17 offer to a shareholder vote and is threatening to sue over it. Perhaps it's just me, but this feels like one of those situations in a bad movie or TV show where two sides are negotiating, and even though one side has instructed everyone to stand firm and play hard to get, as soon as the other side stands firm itself, one guy in the corner gives in and says "take the deal guys! take the deal!" You can almost hear the sighs of exasperation from BEA's board members muttering under their breath and trying to kick Icahn to stay quiet for a little longer to see if Oracle comes back again with another bid.

from the hot-potato dept

In its Thursday earnings call, CNET announced that it sold photo-sharing site Webshots to American Greetings for $45 million in cash. This is yet another chapter in the crazy history of Webshots. Launched in 1996, the founders sold their company to Excite for $84 million in 1999. After the whole dotcom deflation, the founders bought their own company back for $2.4 million in 2002. Then, two years later in 2004, it sold Webshots to CNET for a cool $70 million. So, this week's acquisition marks the fourth time that this property has changed hands.

When CNET purchased Webshots in 2004, it was quietly one of the most trafficked photo-sharing sites on the web. However, momentum and buzz was all around media-darling Flickr and uber-popular MySpace tools like Photobucket, which, according to Alexa, both gained on and then passed Webshots in traffic. Webshots tried to turn the tide by jumping on the video bandwagon, adding social networking features, and launching a photobucket-like blind hosting service, but to not much avail. True, Comscore reports that Webshots is growing again this year while Alexa reports no such growth, but at least the two measures agree on the fact that Webshots growth and audience both pale in comparison with its competitors.

The bigger question remains though -- what is the new owner of Webshots, American Greetings, going to do with the site? American Greetings has made a few web acquisitions in the past, and now owns eGreetings and former #1 traffic king, Blue Mountain Greetings. However, both of those sites are greetings sites, which made perfect sense for them. If this isn't the right place for Webshots, will we yet see another sale for Webshots next year?

from the piles-o'-cash dept

There's been some speculation lately that Facebook is gearing up for an IPO, based on a recent job listing at the company, but it would appear that the Skype billion-dollar buyout plan is still a possibility. New rumors spread by everybody's favorite dot-com analyst, Henry Blodget, say that Microsoft will buy Facebook as a desperate Steve Ballmer looks to get the company some real traction in the social networking and web space. Blodget calls the rumored price of $6 billion a "fly in the ointment." Of course it is: after Yahoo's $1.62 billion offer for Facebook was rejected last year, a Facebook board member quickly said that the site wasn't for sale -- but was worth $8 billion. So going by the Skype plan, since about seven months have passed since that comment, and Facebook's gotten tons of hype since it announced its platform offering (even though page views are off a bit), the going price should be roughly, say, a nice round $20 billion by now. Remember, you heard it here first.